The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine by Michael Kulikowski

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine by Michael Kulikowski Christopher Kelly The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine Michael Kulikowski Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. xxv + 360. ISBN 978-0-674-65961-2. Edward Gibbon had a point. In a rare pause in the powerful argumentative ambuscades of "General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West"—the historian's hesitation is almost perceptible—he reflected: "The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of enquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long" (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 3 (London, 1781), 631). Michael Kulikowski's The Triumph of Empire offers a thoughtful response to Gibbon's all too fleeting concern. The first seven chapters, which move the [End Page 242] imperial story from Trajan to Gordian III, are solidly (and usefully) conventional. Kulikowski's building blocks are imperial reigns; his focus is emperors—their entourages and dynastic rivalries, their political and military achievements and failures. The sheer weight of detail—some dense thickets of proper nouns—is sometimes in danger of overwhelming Kulikowski's key theme: the gradual shift away from an imperial government founded on Roman and Italian elites to one dominated by provincial powerbrokers. Trailed across the preceding narrative (22, 42–43, 92, 153, 167), this idea is finally crystallized in Chapter 15 ("The Structure of Empire Before and After Constantine"). This is Kulikowski at his analytical best, tracing the "equestrianisation" of imperial government, that is, the steady rise of a group of wealthy men, not as rich nor prominent as senators, who shouldered much of the hard work of empire—administrative, financial, infrastructural (food supply, transport, mines, naval and junior military commands). Emperors actively promoted the steady transfer of the responsibility for empire to equestrians, more firmly embedded than senators in provincial life and local patronage networks (254). The result was a change in the nature of imperial government. "The multiplication of equestrian experts in government brought with it a new sense that it was possible to manage things in fundamentally reproducible and impersonal ways across provinces, and without the adhoc-ery that had characterised republican and early imperial governance" (257). To be sure, there is room for debate. One might, for example, quibble at the prejudicial whiff of "gentlemen and players" in Kulikowski's sense of shift from amateur to professional. Or pull back from his assertion that equestrian careers were more meritocratic (73–74, 254). But what matters most is Kulikowski's concern to trace this process of equestrianization from the Antonines through the third century to Constantine. The claim of continuity is striking. It frames Kulikowski's most significant re-working of the standard history of the Roman Empire: an insistence that the third century ce should be treated "as a period with a historical dynamic of its own, not merely as a way station on the road between early and late empires" (118). The Triumph of Empire pivots on Kulikowski's understanding of the third century. (His approach neatly complements Clifford Ando, Imperial Rome ad 193 to 284: The Critical Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), a surprising omission from the bibliography). Kulikowski, in his finest and most compelling discussion, invites readers to look at the Roman Empire from the outside. "Europe", as Kulikowski wryly observes, "is a relatively small corner of the Eurasian landmass" (134). Chapter 8 ("Eurasian History and the Roman Empire") offers a series of splendid, compact surveys (note, in particular, the excellent accounts of Arsacid Parthia and the Central Asian steppes) to advance Kulikowski's argument that "in the third century ad the Roman empire entered Eurasian history for the first time" (119). This welcome widening of perspective means that Kulikowski's third-century chapters (9–11), though still heavily freighted by warfare and civil conflict, are not chiefly concerned to locate the internal failings (political, moral, military) of an empire over-ripened by its immoderate greatness and fatally enervated by the peaceful prosperity of the second century. Kulikowski steadfastly [End Page 243] refuses a...